The Human Legion Deluxe Box Set 2

by Tim C Taylor

  The two Hardits began to pace, perhaps feeling a chill in the early morning air, their muscles cramped after a long stretch of sentry duty. Giant waited patiently for the cyber team to finish their business.

  No hurry, guys. We’ve nothing better to do here.

  Tech-Corporal Malgra would be launching nano-infiltration raids on cameras, wiring and wireless data traffic channels, but Spurrell was the team genius, and didn’t he know it? Brent Spurrell could code slice through alien software stacks and decrypt his way into the vengeful heart of an incoming missile and turn it upon its firer. If only he hadn’t devoted his life to inflicting the most humiliating so-called practical jokes in the entire Far Reach Fleet.

  “And the monkeys are blind!” announced Spurrell. “Thank you and goodnight.”

  “Way to go, code boy,” said Kraken. “Take overwatch from Giant and Fallaw. Giant, when you’re ready, let the fun and games commence.”

  As soon as they were relieved, Giant led Fallaw to creep up the stone steps of this obscene temple and advance on the two Hardits.

  They were Janissaries, a bioengineered development of the Hardits optimized for war, just the same as the Far Reach team would seem like inhuman monsters to the civilians beginning to wake up around them in Victory City. They wore hooded cloaks in a brightly striped fabric that looked so fine that it wouldn’t keep out a light breeze, let alone a volley of railgun darts, but Giant knew looks were often deceptive in the case of the Hardits. New Order armor cloaks were highly effective, and their secret had yet to be fully unraveled by Far Reach techs.

  No matter, she knew how to deal with these jerks.

  Keeping a wide berth, Fallaw and Giant walked behind the Janissaries, ignoring the stubby pulse guns the aliens kept at port arms.

  Walking in front of the enemy’s guns and trusting that your scout model Armored Combat Exosuit would hide you was something she had long become accustomed to. The suits and the AIs inside them were an integral part of the squad, and for the squad to operate effectively, everyone had to trust everyone else to do their job. If you couldn’t trust your comrade or your equipment, you wouldn’t last long as a scout.

  Even so, Giant was sweating when she took up position directly behind one of the Hardits.

  She had to wait a moment for her hands to stop shaking, then she withdrew the hardened ceramic needle sheath, which immediately compromised her scout suit’s stealth integrity. Over to her right, she saw a similar needle appear out of nowhere near the virtual outline of Reed Fallaw. Any Hardit eyes watching would see this. The risk level just ratcheted up a notch. But the two tired Janissary guards kept their eyes facing outward, seeing nothing, despite the Far Reach team out beyond the memorial steps waiting for them to die.

  Giant plunged the needle through the weak point at the base of the Hardit skull and up into the brain areas responsible for forming scent and speech communication. She clamped her arm around the alien, crushing its attempts to escape. It was screaming inside its head, but Giant knew her business and the parts of its brain it needed to scream out its mouth or omit a pheromone call of distress no longer functioned.

  Giant released her arm and the Janissary fell to the marble floor, writhing. She let it be. No one would hear or smell it die.

  Over to the right, Fallaw had dispatched his guard with equal efficiency.

  “Clear,” she said.

  As Kraken, Raschid, Thongsuk, and Bunny ran up the stairs and into the memorial building, Giant and Fallaw unsnapped the carbines from their backs and advanced on the stone edifice that was supposed to represent Tawfiq’s domination of the Earth. Close up, she could tell the marble from which Tawfiq was hewn didn’t match that of her chair, which looked suited for humans not Hardits, although her tail poked through a hole cut into its rear. Makes sense, Giant decided. There must once have been a human figure that Tawfiq had replaced.

  Giant’s steps faltered when she wondered who would replace Tawfiq on that seat. President Lee? Maybe General McEwan or one of the Jotun commanders?

  “I don’t intend to live long enough to find out,” she muttered to herself.

  “Say again?” queried Fallaw.

  “Just thinking,” she replied. “My generation’s done enough. It’s only fair if we leave some thorny problems for you youngsters to figure out.”

  “Let’s kill Tawfiq first.”

  “Copy that. It’s what we’re here to do. Ahh… bingo!”

  Behind the statue’s plinth was a thing of beauty: a trapdoor that led down to the Hardit warren. If their intel was right about this entrance, then it should lead them to Tawfiq’s current location – locked up tight in her personal quarters about 1000 feet to the northwest and 150 feet down.

  Malgra and Thongsuk worked their magic to melt the bolts and hinges locking the door in place.

  “Hold position,” called Lieutenant Morris. “I’m deploying with Blaze Squad.” Giant’s HUD lit up with markers for the officer and ten Marines of Blaze, plus an object of interest tagged with the label PFT: Present for Tawfiq.

  They didn’t have the numbers to take and hold the Victory City warren. This was a different type of operation; Arrow was to secure the entrance and Blaze would go kill Tawfiq. Failing that, they would give Tawfiq her 50 kiloton present, and get the hell outta there.

  “Do it!” said Morris. Malgra and Thongsuk shook the door free of its hinges and picked it up. Giant peered down the hole and saw an elevator shaft. Within seconds, Spurrell had a hovercam inside and announced the lobby beyond the elevator was clear.

  “You take point,” said her brother.

  In all the years they’d served together as brother and sister, they’d always watched out for each other, but they’d never given the other special favors. This time was different. Kraken had made sure she would take the lead, and everyone in the team knew why.

  “Unlucky for you this is my last mission, Tawfiq,” she said. “There’s just one more achievement I want to unlock, and it’s got your name on it.”

  With that, Giant jumped down the lift shaft.

  ——

  Grenadier Reed Fallaw

  Beneath the Tawfiq Memorial.

  With a dull metallic clang, Reed landed beside Giant on top of the elevator cab. Together, they efficiently melted through its roof and jumped below into monkey territory, trusty SA-71s out and ready to blast the vile creatures into bloody scraps of pelt.

  The place was clear, though, just as the hovercam had promised. It was a lobby, a clean and open space about fifty feet square with a broad corridor leading away to the north. Reed let his suit scan for explosives and signs of surveillance. He discovered neither.

  “Cover the exit,” said Giant as she took a moment to confer with the Marines topside.

  Reed obeyed, covering the corridor with his carbine. The light was low but plenty enough to see that there were no monkey-vecks to shoot yet.

  Monkeys. Reed cursed silently. The older Marines – Giant in particular – were old school in their attitude to Hardits. As Giant was fond of saying, the only good Hardit was skinned and used as a rug in a high-traffic area. But Reed had known Far Reach Hardits. There weren’t many, and he couldn’t say he liked them, but they were fair in their own way. He couldn’t summon up the same kind of hatred for Hardits as a race, but he reminded himself of the tales he’d heard of Janissary atrocities.

  Murdering skangat Janissaries! Yeah that will do.

  Orange targeting brackets appeared in his HUD, indicating a possible threat. Then they turned red and a Hardit walked into view at the far end of the passageway.

  “Contact!” he confirmed to Giant, though she should be seeing a threat warning in her own HUD.

  “What’s it doing?” asked the veteran corporal.

  With a thought, he communicated his interest to his ACE suit, which magnified the image of the hooded Janissary walking toward him. It wore baggy fabric clothing and was armed with a pistol slung around its hips. In one hand it carried a cup
of a steaming beverage and in the other was a small cannister with a short tube projecting from its lid.

  “Er, Corporal, I think it’s come out for a coffee and a…”

  The Hardit plunged the tube into its nostril and snorted.

  “And to indulge in recreational pharmaceuticals.”

  “That will be tarngrip tea chaser and a snort of halo dust,” said Giant. “Waste the veck!”

  Reed gave the murdering skangat a triple-tap to its head.

  To counter the insufficient penetrating power of carbine darts against the latest Janissary armor weave, the Far Reach team had set their guns to automatically fire a rapid three-round burst. With the recoil suppression on max, the rounds would impact at almost the same point, and battlefield experience had shown this to be more effective than a single round of higher momentum. But whatever the creature in Reed’s sights had been wearing, it wasn’t armor fabric because it went down with barely a grunt, and both head and hood in tatters. Steaming tarngrip tea spilled onto the floor, mixing with its drinker’s blood.

  Reed and Giant advanced up the corridor, each of them alternately providing overwatch while the other rushed ahead. They made rapid progress, attaching sticky signal repeater nodes to the walls to keep the SBN link to the rest of the team via secure line-of-sight microwave beams. The progress was so rapid, that soon they were passing junctions and doorways that they simply swept past, making Reed’s heart beat faster every time. There was no time to check for the enemy along every side passage, not enough Marines to hold the ground with any certainty even if they did.

  Giant pushed on at a relentless pace. At first, Reed let himself be pulled along in the wake of her ferocious urge to close on Tawfiq. But with his HUD overlays bringing home that they were increasingly isolated from the rest of the Arrows who had also entered the burrow, nerves worried at his mind. Arrow Squad’s role was to secure a way through to Tawfiq, not to take her out themselves. Had Giant gone off plan?

  Reed was in the process of finding the right form of words to tell Giant to slow the frakk down, without getting a ceramic needle shoved through his visor, when she raised a hand, signaling him to halt.

  She backed up a few paces, so she could touch suits with him and communicate by pulsed van de Waals forces, an ultra-secure comms channel.

  “Keep to the plan,” she said. It wasn’t just words she was sharing; his HUD now highlighted the BEFOIs she’d spotted: Battlezone Environment Features of Interest. In this case, they were viewing slits cut into the walls. A HUD text remark pointed out that the air beyond those slits was rich with Hardit scent.

  “Guard post?” Reed suggested.

  “Or defensive chokepoint. I want you to stow your carbine and rely on your ACE magic to get us through.”

  “Shouldn’t we check with Sergeant Kraken?”

  Reed regretted the words the moment they left his lips. Interfering with the brother-sister dynamic was like poking a nest of vipers with your dick to see what would happen next, except ten times as dangerous.

  “It’s a fair question,” Giant replied, though she said it as if she wanted to rip his limbs off. Slowly. “But I trust the sergeant’s competence. He will be observing our situation through SBNet, and he’s said nothing.”

  “Then I’m good to go,” said Reed as he deactivated his carbine and snapped it onto his back. His suit absorbed the weapon.

  For thousands of years, teams of alien techs from across the White Knight Empire had developed the forerunner of Reed’s SA-71 carbine to work alongside the ACE exosuits. The suit’s stealth capabilities extended to the gun, but the weapon remained a weak point in the endless battle to avoid detection, and any form of camouflage was only as strong as its weakest element. Legion and Far Reach techs had recently started to redevelop the old stealth tech – as had the New Order – and one improvement was to snap the carbine diagonally across the wearer’s back and let the exosuit swaddle the weapon with invisibility.

  It made a big improvement to your chances of remaining undetected, but if you needed to fire your gun in a hurry… then it didn’t feel like such an improvement.

  Fighting the urge to crouch low beneath the view slits – he knew it would make no difference – Reed walked along the passageway, clenching his fists to give his hands something to do.

  They followed the corridor as it veered left and saw it terminate in a room filled with Janissaries and protected by a heavy blast door.

  The Hardits seemed to be chatting amongst themselves happily, and given the strength of the musky odor that permeated Reed’s helmet, this guard room – if that was its role – was permanently occupied.

  And the reason Reed could tell all this… the blast door was wide open.

  Giant tapped a hand onto his shoulder to allow a little van de Waals chatter. “If that’s not an invitation,” she said, “I don’t know what is.”

  “Doesn’t feel right. There’s supposed to be a major attack, an armed uprising. Shouldn’t they be on high alert?”

  “Monkey-frakkers are the most ill-disciplined scum in existence. Give soldiering a bad name all over the galaxy.”

  Reed couldn’t argue with that. Even so, this seemed too easy. Of course, with the blast door open, they could simply toss in a few fraggers and watch the bloodied fur fly. But if Giant wasn’t suggesting that, then he wouldn’t either.

  “Copy that,” he said. “So… we’re just gonna walk right through that guard room and out the other side?”

  “No, Fallaw. We’re going to shoot the bad guys, but we’re going to do it in such a way that we slaughter them before they know what’s happening – before they can set off an alert. Once we’re in, you head to the southwest corner, and I’ll take southeast. On my mark, unsnap your SA-71 and we’ll introduce the frakkers to a Far Reach crossfire.”

  Reed would feel a whole lot better tossing in a few grenades, but you never knew what you’d be walking into when you followed up your bombardment.

  “What’s the matter?” Giant asked. “Haven’t you got the balls, Grenadier?”

  “Sure I do. Maybe not like yours, Giant, but plenty enough for those monkeys. I just like throwing things first. Guess it’s more than just my job title.”

  With every step Reed took closer to the guard post, the Hardit noises grew ever louder: low growls and long sighs blown down lupine snouts to vibrate rubbery Hardit lips. The translator system in his suit didn’t volunteer a translation, which was no surprise because the Hardit language was continually splitting and its branches evolving into new forms. He was no expert on Hardit social norms, but they appeared relaxed to him. But for sentries in the middle of an uprising? Giant was right, they were an embarrassment to the soldiering profession.

  By the time he’d walked over the blast door threshold, he was convinced the Janissaries’ slovenly attitude was not a trick. Two of the Hardits were sitting in comfortable chairs, guns in their laps, seeming to watch Reed and Giant’s approach but seeing nothing.

  Another pair sat by the only visible exit, another open blast door that sloped down to the northeast.

  A clear path through the cluttered guard post connected the two exits, wide enough for two Hardits to pass abreast. It passed at the center of the room through a transparent archway that looked to Reed like a 3D view-tank, and was displaying brightly colored ribbons slowly threading through each other.

  Reed realized he’d hesitated with one boot rooted where the blast door’s frame was sunk into the earth. He took a deep breath, and then advanced two clear steps into the room.

  The sentries didn’t react, and neither did the other Hardits, some of whom were drinking and chatting gruffly, but mostly they were staring at the ribbon patterns in the central archway. They reminded Reed of the soporific patterns you watched at night to distract you from the nightmares, but the aliens had ears erect and noses quivering with keen interest.

  He was falling behind Giant, who was already halfway to the southeast corner of the room. So he spe
d up, giving the Janissaries as wide a berth as he could, which wasn’t much because they were all around him.

  Suddenly, the Janissaries came to life with roars, growls and hissing.

  Spinning to face the center of the room, Reed reached behind to unsnap his carbine, but stopped just in time. The ribbons on the view-arch had frozen in place, and despite the species boundary, he understood immediately what he was seeing. Half the aliens were howling in delight, their tails high and lashing from side to side. Meanwhile the others had tails down and were fishing out plastic chits to hand to their happier comrades.

  Gambling.

  A universal vice, Reed thought. I love it. Whoever said gambling’s bad for your health obviously never went traipsing through an enemy guard post. Last chance to lay your bets, Janissary jackwads. This den’s getting busted!

  The guards settled down and Reed hurried to his target position, but the final steps were almost blocked. To his right a pair of seated Hardits were enjoying mugs of tea, and to his left another was perched on a metal cabinet stripping and now reassembling its rifle. The gap between them was just arm’s length.

  His heart was thundering so hard that he was surprised the Hardits couldn’t hear it with their sensitive ears. Call yourself a grenadier? he admonished himself. Get the job done.

  Reed turned clockwise through ninety degrees and sidestepped through the Hardits.

  With his knees almost brushing the chair where one was sitting, a sudden change came through the room and his heart seemed to stop. The Hardit in front of him shot to its feet.

  Reed backed up just a few inches and reached for the needle that had put paid to the Janissary at the topside memorial. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but he wanted its faster draw.

  But he realized the Hardit hadn’t seen or smelled him. It was gesturing at the archway with its tail as were many of its fellows. Reed chanced a look. The gambling show was over, replaced by a montage of images from an outdoor urban location of sunbaked and dilapidated human buildings. Soldiers in brown and green camo battledress were spilling out of a mix of civilian and military wheeled vehicles. They were humans. Smaller than Marines like Reed, but he noted the determination on their faces and the familiarity with which they carried their weapons.